Wadi Musa

The valley below the modern town was settled long before Petra: the Neolithic village at Beidha, a few kilometres north, is one of the oldest known settlements in the region, and the spring at Ain Musa has drawn people to the ridge for millennia. From around the fourth century BC the Nabataeans, Arab traders who controlled the incense routes out of Arabia, built their capital in the sandstone basin beyond the gorge and engineered dams, channels and cisterns to carry the valley's water into it. Rome annexed the kingdom in 106 AD, an earthquake in 363 did great damage, and the city faded from outside knowledge for centuries.

Through the Middle Ages and the Ottoman period the settlement above the ruins was a farming village whose terraces of figs, grapes and pomegranates were watered by the spring, while the Bdul lived among the tombs and caves below. The Swiss traveller Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, disguised as a pilgrim, reached the ruins in 1812 and brought them back to European attention, and a slow trickle of scholars and travellers followed.

The town that now carries the name Wadi Musa grew with that traffic. Excavation and study intensified through the twentieth century; in 1985 the Bdul were resettled in the new village of Umm Sayhoun on the ridge, and in December of that year Petra was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Hotels spread down the hillside, the site's entrance and visitor centre were rebuilt, and a village of farmers became a town whose fortunes rise and fall with regional crises and the number of visitors who reach the Siq.

Wadi Musa's identity is bound to the site below it. Tribal belonging still orders much of local life: the Liyathnah are long established in the town itself, while the Bdul of Umm Sayhoun keep a distinct identity and a close relationship with Petra, where families have worked as guides, drivers and stallholders for generations. Hospitality follows Bedouin form — small glasses of sweet tea, cardamom coffee poured from a long-spouted pot, an insistence that a guest eat before talking business.

Manners are conservative. Dress covers shoulders and knees for both men and women away from the site, couples are discreet in public, and Friday prayers empty the streets for part of the day. Ramadan reshapes the year: restaurants that serve visitors stay open, but the town turns nocturnal, with families gathering after sunset and the site quieter by day.

Alongside this runs a fluent, multilingual tourist culture unusual in a town of this size. Guides licensed by the Petra authority speak several languages, and schoolchildren practise their English and other languages on visitors. The traditions of Bedouin music — the single-stringed rababa, sung poetry, drumming around a fire — are performed for guests at camps and hotels and still belong to family occasions.

Around 17,000 people live in Wadi Musa, with several thousand more in Umm Sayhoun and the surrounding villages of the Petra district. The town is the administrative centre of its area, with schools, a hospital and government offices, but nearly every household depends in some way on the archaeological site: hotel work, restaurants, taxis, horses and camels, souvenir stalls, guiding and the construction that follows good seasons.

That dependence makes life volatile. Regional conflict, pandemic closures and shifts in air links have each emptied the town's hotels within weeks, and underemployment among young people is a constant concern; families also keep goats, olive terraces and small plots as a hedge. Older residents remember when the valley below was farmland and grazing rather than a ticketed site.

The daily rhythm follows the visitors. Minibuses and taxis take workers down to the gate before the site opens, the main road is busy through the morning, the afternoon heat quietens everything, and the evening brings families out to shops and cafés along the ridge. Water is scarce and supplied on a rota, as in much of Jordan; building continues up the hillside, and the road between the ridge and the gate is the town's spine, its shops and hotels arranged along a climb of several hundred metres.

Eating in Wadi Musa mixes Jordanian home cooking with what the hotels have built for visitors. Maqluba — 'upside down' — appears everywhere: rice layered with chicken or lamb and fried aubergine and cauliflower, cooked in one pot and turned out onto a tray. Mansaf, lamb cooked in a sauce of fermented dried yoghurt called jameed and served over rice and thin shrak bread, remains the dish of weddings, funerals and honoured guests, eaten by hand from a shared platter in the proper form. Grills of chicken, kofta and lamb come with hummus, mutabbal, tabbouleh and pickles.

Bedouin cooking is the other strand. Zarb is meat and vegetables cooked slowly in a covered pit in the ground, usually served at camps and at some hotels on the ridge; shrak, the paper-thin flatbread baked on a domed metal griddle, is folded around everything. Tea is black, very sweet and often flavoured with sage or mint, and coffee is Arabic-style, pale with cardamom and poured in small quantities.

Cheap eating is along the main road: falafel fried to order, shawarma turning in the doorways, foul and hummus for breakfast, and fresh juice. Bakeries sell ma'amoul, the date- or nut-filled semolina biscuits made for feasts, along with knafeh, the shredded pastry and cheese dessert soaked in syrup that Jordanians eat at any hour. Alcohol is confined to hotels and a small number of licensed bars.